Cryptonite January 2023
It’s time for Cryptonite - our monthly roundup of all things crypto - with Tejaswi Nadahalli.
You can follow Tejaswi on twitter @nadahalli and he blogs at tejaswin.com
We discussed a bunch of things, some highlights:
What we call “corruption”, the Americans call “lobbying and political donations”. Exhibit A: Sinema received nearly $1 million from Wall Street while killing a tax hike on investors (pbs), preserving a $14 billion tax break for private equity, hedge fund, and real estate executives (businessinsider).
Aswath Damodaran did a drive-by on the Adani saga (aswathdamodaran). He pegs the ADANIENT stock at ₹ 945, which is a quarter of where it was before the Hindenburg disaster.
Found out that there’s a “Bitcoin Jesus”. Not to be confused with the dude who claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto and goes around suing everybody who says he isn’t (theguardian). fml.
People are putting NFTs on the bitcoin blockchain and the purists are up in arms against it. I say, if you can have Netflix using the tcp/ip stack, then why can’t the bitcoin protocol accommodate monkey jpegs? (decrypt)
From the Engines that Move Markets:
So, is there a list of companies that are in trouble because of crypto?
Links
In what form do bitcoin holders bear bitcoin's huge energy costs? (jpkoning)
~
Contagion!
Signature and Silvergate, two of the biggest banks to cryptocurrency companies are rushing to stem a flood of customer withdrawals by borrowing billions of dollars from Federal Home Loan Banks, the system originally designed to support mortgage lending in the 1930s. Signature Bank tapped its local home-loan bank for nearly $10 billion while Silvergate Capital received at least $3.6 billion (WSJ).
~
Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group:
Crypto lender Genesis files for bankruptcy. (cnbc)
Crypto firms Genesis and Gemini charged by SEC with selling unregistered securities. (cnbc)
Barbarians Are at Grayscale’s Gates. (blockworks)
~
Looks like SBF was very generous with client funds.
In September 2021, Sotheby’s offered up for auction a cache of 101 Bored Ape NFTs as a lot in a special sale called Ape In! Specialists in the house’s digital-art department bullishly offered the lot at an estimate of somewhere between $12 million and $18 million. Instead, the lot of 107 NFTs sold for $24.4 million. Some close observers have settled on the idea that the buyer of the Apes at Sotheby’s was FTX. (vanityfair)
